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March 2009 Newsletter

Project of the Month

Perenich & Caulfield Photography

For this month’s featured project, we present a collection of portrait photography we recently shot for Clearwater law firm Perenich & Caulfield. We chose this project because it gives us an opportunity to demonstrate that even assignments that may seem fairly straight-forward can benefit from hiring experienced and knowledgeable professionals with the right equipment for the job. From setup to lighting to client interaction to post-production, each project consists of components that provide opportunities to create either mediocre images or imagery that captures the viewers’ attention. Check out the Perenich & Caulfield photography and see what you think.

Marketing Tip

Streaming video makes a Website sticky

Tech Tip

A brief history of Web video

Watching video on our computers is pretty much a common daily activity for most of us. Video clips available on YouTube, Google Video, Apple’s Movie Trailer Page and thousands of other Websites featuring video clips can keep us entertained and informed for hours a day. But it wasn’t too long ago that viewing digital video on our computers was considered cutting edge technology.


The first mainstream consumer application for watching video on computer screens was with Apple’s QuickTime Player back in late 1991. QuickTime allowed the playback of compressed media - audio and video clips that used compressors and decompressors (codecs) to drastically reduce the size of audio and video files. It was, of course, initially available for Macintosh users. In typical Microsoft fashion, the Windows 3.1 manufacturer came out with their own video player product about a year later. But both of these technologies were designed for playing back local video files that either resided on the user’s internal hard drive on on a CD-ROM placed in the user’s optical drive.


The early to mid 1990‘s saw a huge expansion of the publicly-accessible Internet system and Web publishers began to post short video clips as downloadable files to be played back locally after the user patiently waited for the files to be delivered to their hard drives. Apple’s QuickTime team developed a way to allow video playback within the browser after a shorter waiting time but it wasn’t until the mid-1990’s that real-time media playback over the Internet was developed. In 1995, Progressive Networks (which was later renamed RealNetworks) presented the first live streaming audio broadcast of a New York Yankees vs. Seattle Mariners baseball game. Two years later they added real-time video streaming capabilities.


Video compression technology and Internet connection speeds have advanced to the point where decent-quality, real-time playback is commonplace. QuickTime, Windows Media, Real  Networks and, more recently, Adobe’s Flash Video are the main providers of Internet video playback technology. Each format has its strengths and weaknesses. Content providers can choose which playback format meets their particular needs.







At Digital Media Services, we use QuickTime when when we need to present high-quality video content with flexible playback options and Flash Video when we need to present video to a general Internet audience who are likely to have a video-capable version of Flash installed on their PC.


Video compression is still a fairly complicated science. Maximizing the relationship between file size and video quality is the main challenge of a video compressionist. Shooting the original video in a manner that makes for an efficient compression is an important consideration when producing content intended for Web delivery.


Digital Media Services has been working with Web video since 1997 and has produced everything from audio Podcasts to multi-camera live video broadcasts of Fortune 1000 company annual shareholder meetings.

All imagery and content copyright © 2009 by Digital Media Services & Consulting LLC. All rights reserved.

Digital Media Services

One of the criteria for measuring the success of your Website is how much time individual visitors spend browsing the site. The longer a potential customer remains on the site, the more information he or she is likely to obtain and therefore the more likely they are to become a client or advocate. We all know that compelling content is what drives the best Websites. But finding the most effective way to present that content is worth some consideration.


In many instances, video can be an extremely effective medium for presenting critical information. An overview of company values presented by senior management, a detailed description of a top-selling product, the presentation of a manufacturing process or a summarization of a proprietary service are all examples of content that may be better presented with video than with words alone. Remember, anything that makes it easier for the site visitor to obtain information will improve the chances of that information being delivered.


But be careful about the quality of video you present on your site. While YouTube makes it easy to get video on the Web, a low-quality, unprofessional video may do more harm than good. Viewers may not take seriously “home video” content. And, yes, there are ways to add video to a Website without it being unnecessarily expensive.


Consider adding at least some amount of video content to your site; one extra sale generated by the video presentation could pay for the costs of video production.

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Extras

Other cool DMS projects

Questions? Comments? Feedback? All are greatly appreciated! Email us by clicking here or call us at 727-512-9998. We’d love to hear from you!

Photographer Sean Deren continued to work with Stemulite during March shooting product and promotional photography. Producer Vince Mann worked with Bonefish Grill on a national photo shoot and with Boston Productions on a biodiesel documentary. Brian Satchfield reworked the DMS Website adding Flash Video to the Video Production and Video Editing pages for greater compatibility with a variety of computer systems.